Gauth vs Symbolab: Which Should You Use?

Half of that table goes to Symbolab, and the losses are not cosmetic. No phone app, no graphing, no generated practice, a much smaller set of dedicated calculators, and a higher price. If you were buying a toolkit by the pound, this comparison would already be over.

Gauth. First solution free with no account. Free accounts get three solutions a day. Gauth Plus is $11.99 a month with a three-day free trial, $31.99 a quarter, or $99.99 a year, as of September 2026. Follow-ups never count against the daily allowance. Full details sit on the Gauth pricing page.

Symbolab.Symbolab’s own registration page showed Pro at $9.95 a month, $32.95 every six months, or $39.95 a year in September 2026, which puts the annual plan a little over $3 a month and keeps it among the cheapest step-by-step subscriptions in this comparison. Treat those numbers as a guide rather than a quote: third-party listings circulate lower figures, prices bought through the App Store or Google Play differ from the website, and Symbolab runs promotions. Read the checkout screen. Symbolab also sells a combined plan with QuillBot, and subscriptions renew automatically, which is worth knowing before you pay for a year up front.

The free tiers work differently rather than one being strictly larger. Symbolab will answer without payment but gates the depth of the working, and shows ads while it does it. Gauth gates the number of solutions rather than their depth: whatever you get, you get in full, with the reasoning attached.

Take $\int x{e}^{2x}dx$. Nothing about it is hard once you have committed to integration by parts. The whole difficulty is knowing that parts is the move, and that $x$ is the piece you differentiate.

Symbolabis fast and correct here. It identifies the technique, states the substitution it is making, and lays out each manipulation in properly typeset notation with the rule named beside it — the sort of output you can copy into a notebook and hand in. On Pro it will also let you expand a line for more detail and ask its AI chat about it. The gap, and it is a consistent one, is between naming a rule and justifying it. "Apply integration by parts, $u=x$, $dv=e^{2x}dx$" tells you what happened. It does not tell you that $u$ is chosen to be the factor that gets simpler when differentiated, which is the single idea that makes every future parts problem tractable.

Gauth leads with that idea. It says the integrand is a polynomial times an exponential, that differentiating $x$ collapses it to 1 while integrating $e^{2x}$ costs nothing worse than a factor of a half, and only then does the algebra. The result renders as real notation rather than as (x*e^(2x))/2 - e^(2x)/4, and you can ask what happens if the exponent were $-2x$ without re-entering anything. The choosing rule itself is set out in our guide to LIATE and integration by parts, and the same reasoning applied to substitution problems is in finding the inner function.

Symbolab is a real computer algebra system with a study product wrapped around it, and that engine is the strongest thing in this comparison. On integrals, limits, series expansions, matrix operations, and differential equations it produces exact symbolic results, not approximations, and it produces them in typeset notation that matches how the working is expected to appear on paper. If your problem is genuinely a computation problem — you know the method, you need it executed without arithmetic slips — Symbolab is the faster instrument.

The surrounding toolkit is broader than ours in ways that matter over a semester. Pro includes generated practice problems and quizzes on the topic you were just working on, plus a worksheet generator, which turns a solver into something closer to a revision system. There is a graphing calculator alongside it, and a saved notebook of your past problems. Gauth has none of these. If you want one subscription that both answers and drills, Symbolab covers ground we do not.

Then there is the sheer number of doors into the site. Symbolab maintains hundreds of dedicated calculators — partial fractions, Wronskian, arc length, Laplace transforms — each with its own input already configured for the problem type. Search for almost any named operation and you land on a page that expects exactly that input. It is a genuinely good way to work when you know the name of what you need.

And the price is hard to argue with. On the annual plan Symbolab Pro came to well under half the cost of unlimited Gauth in September 2026, whichever of the circulating figures turns out to apply to you. For a student who can already read symbolic steps and simply needs volume, that is the correct purchase, and no amount of explanation quality changes the arithmetic.